


Fangs

by smirc



Category: RWBY
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon, White Fang, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-08-16 04:28:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20195713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smirc/pseuds/smirc
Summary: It doesn’t occur to you that you are, in fact, running away. The only thing that registers in your mind is that you are running towards danger, so it feels right and just, even as you leave your family behind.





	Fangs

**Author's Note:**

> I took some liberties with Blake’s backstory and the settings involved (that I remember) so this isn’t really canon-compliant.

Your grandfather insists when you are seven years old that it was a mistake for Ghira to take you out of your homeland with him during his time as a public figure for the White Fang. It’s the first time you’ve been to Menagerie since you were three, and the second time you’ve been since your birth during the worst cyclone to ever hit the island.

“Look at you!” your grandfather growls, holding you gently despite the aggression so clear in the curl of his lips and his deep, mean-looking scowl. He’s a large man, like your father, with a barrel chest and arms like the thick posts that hold up the roof in the local mess hall. He guides you by your wrists, turning your painfully thin arms this way and that to examine blue bruises that look worse on your olive skin than they actually are. You tell him as much, but he huffs. “Don’t be tough with me, cub. I know these ache. We might act like stone but you and I are the same: flesh and bone. Don’t be tough with me. I’ll be impressed when you start being _ honest._” 

You look down at the floor, down at the sandals he ordered you to change into because suede sneakers are for _ humans. _You tell him quietly about the man who attacked your mother in broad daylight during a rally in Vale. You tell him about how you attacked him in kind, biting with the small, sharp canines that have begun to come into your mouth. You tell him about how afraid you were. 

“Were you afraid for yourself, or for your mother?”

You scowl. The pain of that day still sits within you, and you will never not dread its presence, but a little pain doesn’t matter when your mother is involved. You tell him as much. 

You read more than you speak, but you are ineloquent when it comes to your feelings. You can’t quite articulate to your grandfather how your chest burns with the urge to defend your mother from anything and everything that would do her harm; you can’t explain how you feel the same for your father, though he insists that he can handle himself and that the power of your words will better protect all that you love. 

Your grandfather smiles at you. His canines are longer than any human’s, though they aren’t too strange, and they gleam white even in the shade of a coconut tree. It’s his long, winding black tail that gives him away as Faunus. His smile lines are deep and the crows feet around his eyes stretch back into his thick, jet black hair. Kali looks incredibly similar to the black-haired, yellow-eyed Belladonnas, but you know that the olive of your skin and the way you smile come all the way from the man before you. 

“You’re a good one, cub. Fierce.” He sets his hands, as large around as human dinner plates, atop your skinny shoulders. “Never let anyone lay a finger on you or any Faunus without paying dearly for it. Did the man who did this pay?” 

“She bit off most of his ear.” It’s your mother, and her tone is cold. Living in Mantle for so many years has made her nearly incapable of having you out of her sight for more than a moment, and she doesn’t like talking about any sort of violence that goes on there or anywhere else. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t encourage her, Achilles.” 

Large hands squeeze your shoulders once before dropping, and though you can tell that his muscles are stiff with something you don’t understand, he winks at you. “I was kicking in shins at _ five _, Kali. She has to start sometime.” 

“This isn’t Atlas from forty years ago, and Blake is _ not _a soldier.” 

Your mother has a tendency to speak as if you aren’t in the room, or as though you can’t understand her because you’re young. You know what Atlas is, what Atlas _ means _ for your people and their history, and you damn well know what a _ soldier _ is. 

You want to be one. Your grandfather was one, your father _ is _one, and you’re pretty sure your mother is too, given the way she knocked two humans on their asses with one sweep of a leg. 

“If you’d never taken her away, she wouldn’t have to be.” 

Other kids don’t leave Menagerie, ever. They go to school with each other, play in each other’s houses, and don’t know anything about the Kingdoms of Remnant like you do. It’s strange. Sometimes you’re jealous of them. This is one of those times. Your mother and grandfather wouldn’t be fighting if you were one of those kids.

Kali beckons you over, and as you go one of your hands brushes your grandfather’s knee in a silent, secretive farewell. You know he felt it when you turn in your mother’s arms and see his smile. There’s a strain to it now, not dissimilar to how your father’s gets when it’s too early or too late in the day, but it’s a smile all the same. 

This time when he winks at you, you manage a pretty successful wink in reply. 

-

Your godfather has been with you and your parents for years now, but the summer you spend in Menagerie when you are nine and recovering from a broken arm marks the first time you meet his wife. 

Solomon, massive and hulking like your father but with mahogany skin and tall, curling antlers, is a sharp contrast to his wife. Amara is a slight woman with pale olive skin and kind hazel eyes that somehow make your back less tense and your arm hurt less. 

“Great Mother have mercy, you’ve grown so much.” 

She’s a stranger, in truth, but you know that people only get married when they truly love each other, so if Solomon loves Amara, then you love her, too. That’s why you don’t slap her hands away when she traces the line of your brow and rubs her thumb over the jut of your sleek chin, where the skin there is interrupted by a pair of scars from a bad fall.

“I used to carry you…” Amara trails off, and her eyes fall to your bandaged arm. You can see, almost in slow motion, how her body seems to become too heavy for her bones and she slumps where she stands, defeated. People in Menagerie, you notice, always get like this when they remember where you’ve been and where you go when you leave them again. “Nevermind. Come—do you like tea? Are you too young for tea?”

“What’s tea?”

Kind hazel eyes widen. “What?”

You shrug. “We only have coffee in Atlas.” 

A look that reminds you of the sound of thunder passes just as quickly across Amara’s face before she smiles. Her teeth are sharp for a Gazelle Faunus, but she’s beautiful all the same, and you trail after her like a duckling as she moves through the kitchen, prepping this drink you’ve never heard of before. 

“The Atlesians won’t waste the space inside their indoor farms to grow the necessary herbs for tea, and it’s not something in-demand over there, so no need to import it. Coffee though, those guys love coffee. Faunus, on the other hand… we would pick herbs and set them to soak in pots of lukewarm water when fire was a privilege. Once things… once things got better—once fire was something we could have in different places—we started brewing it hot; boiling herbs for pleasure or to ease pain. Anima was where the Faunus worked with some humans to start really making tea for profit, and things like that.” She passes you a ceramic cup that you know is handcrafted—everything in Menagerie is handcrafted. “Here. If you’d like sugar, let me know. I like to put a lot.”

You take a sip and quietly reach for the sugar, and Amara smiles like you’ve hung the sun in the sky just for her. 

-

The White Fang cell in Menagerie is small, but it makes sense to you because no one here carries weapons; they are at peace. The sun shines bright and golden and the waters are clear. In Mantle, there is no water, and even when the sun shines it fails to light up the dilapidated concrete towers that make up the city. Ilia, your friend from Atlas who passes notes to your father every Sunday afternoon, bought you a dictionary for your eighth birthday, so you know what the word _ bleak _ means. It’s the best descriptor you have for Mantle aside from _ cold. _

The Fangs you meet when you are eleven are broad and tan and clean, a direct contrast to the wiry, haggard Fangs who run with your father, tense with paranoia as they fight the urge to flee when surrounded by humans at rallies. These Fangs have clean white teeth and clean white eyes, and if they’re anywhere younger than twenty-five, they don’t have much in the way of scars. They boast about scrapes and bruises from sparring, yet you could lift your shirt and show them were a human police officer jabbed you with an electrified prong, leaving two round, silvery white scars just below the end of your collarbone, near your right shoulder; you had been caught painting a mural for a dead Faunus boy with goofy grey dog ears, and you were punished like it was still Mantle from before the Great War. 

In the end, you do show them, and their faces grow blank before they grin and slap your shoulders. 

“Good on you, cub; fighting the good fight.” 

You make the mistake of asking them how their fighting is going, and they abandon you at the local mess hall two blocks from your grandfather’s home in Kuo Kuana. Instead of running to him, tattling on the fresh-faced Fangs that your father trusted to take care of you, you stay behind and shyly ask for a meal; your mother had given you a small pouch full of Menagerie money—square copper coins stamped with the sun and shattered moon on either side. 

The food in Menagerie is different, too. It’s all fresh fruits and cuts of seared lamb—sheep are the priority livestock here, above even the horses Faunus use to get around—where in Mantle you subsist on freeze-dried rations or whatever the cooks in the Fang cell can scrounge together with old ingredients. That, the cook at the mess hall says, is why you are so small. 

“Eat more,” she tells you, her scaly green forearms crossed over her chest. She’s old, her hair grey and her face slumping down like her skin has given up. “You need to be strong.” 

It’s a gruff interaction, and you feel as though you’ve gained yet another parent, constantly on your back when it comes to _ surviving _ and _ being strong_. You imagine that your grandfather would like this cook, and dig into your roast lamb and cold mango slices with gusto. 

-

When you are twelve, you land a brutal blow on Adam’s face that breaks his nose in two places. Both of you have yet to unlock your auras and semblances, so injuries are automatic and not easily healed.

You only see Ilia on Sundays, so he is your main friend, and you never, _ ever _thought that you would be able to hit him as hard as he hit you. 

But you did, and you feel _ terrible. _

He gets angry when you drop your practice sword and run to his side, shoving you away and onto the padded floor. 

“_No!_” he shouts, red eyes blazing. “Don’t be an _ idiot_.” You’re terrified that you’ve done something else wrong, but Adam smiles a second later. “This is _ good_, silly. A crack like that would knock a human down for sure, but I’m not human, and neither are you.” 

He picks up his practice sword, and you pick up yours. For a moment you stand opposite him, chest heaving, and you can feel the cold rush of your momentary fear sizzle away in the face of your burgeoning confidence. You’re getting stronger. 

You lunge at him, speckled with blood and patterned in bruises, when he orders, “_Again._” 

-

You are thirteen and just a few months shy of fourteen when your parents announce that your family will be moving back to Menagerie permanently. They try to reason with you once they realize that you are not happy as they expected. 

“Amara’s baby will be due soon, and you’ll get to go to school with your friends in Menagerie.” 

“I can go to the Atlas Academy,” you argue, scowling in a way that you hope is like your grandfather. Achilles has the best scowl. You could be a Huntress, like Ilia wants to be. The humans would be so lucky.

“That’s for older kids, cub.” Your father drops to a knee so that he’s at your eye-level, and he sets his big hands on your shoulders; they are still skinny, just as the rest of you is still small. “Besides, I thought you wanted to go home?” 

Of course you did. All you wanted was to live with your grandfather and visit the mess hall, eating lamb and mango and fish smoked with apples and spices that only grow on the island. You love the people—not the Fangs, never the weak Fangs—and you love splashing in crystalline water whenever you want; you’d gotten so good at swimming during those few summers you had. 

But now there is Adam and the Fangs—the _ real _Fangs, fighting the good fight. Adam told you that you have a place there, as a Fang, and that you can travel the world with him once you get better at fighting. You weren’t sure if your father, the leader of the White Fang these past six years, would let you travel with Adam, who he certainly didn’t like, but if he’s moving back to Menagerie… 

“You’re not going to be the leader of the Fangs anymore, are you?”

Your father shakes his head. “No. Sienna Khan will take my place.” 

You don’t want to look too eager at the news—he won’t be able to stop you and Adam now—and settle for a question. “Why?”

Your father looks as though he has aged a thousand years at your prompting. “Your grandfather has passed away. The Chieftain has asked me to return and serve as an advisor.”

That leaves you numb, and you turn and run out the door of your small underground complex apartment towards Adam’s cramped room in the barracks. 

They’re giving up because your grandfather is dead, becoming like those Fangs in Menagerie who don’t have any scars, and you can feel hate begin to grow in your heart because of it. Adam always looked down on the Fangs in Menagerie, either from afar or up close, during one of the rare occasions when he would be permitted to return with you to the island. He’d call them children playing at war, even if they were double his age. 

“_They’re delusional, Blake,_” Adam would say, sometimes at least once a week, or every day when they were on the island together. “_They think they’re the upcoming victors in our war, but they’re wrong. We are the warriors, the martyrs who suffer laurels of love on our coffins when the humans come knocking and we don’t hide. They’re fakes. They hide on their island and pretend everything is fine. We’ll show them that they’re fakes._”

You won’t give up. You won’t become some sun-drunk Fang playing games with wooden swords on an island two thousand miles from the humans who hate and hurt your kind. You won’t run away like your mother and father. 

It doesn’t occur to you that you are, in fact, running away. The only thing that registers in your mind is that you are running towards danger, so it feels _ right _ and _ just, _even as you leave your family behind.

This will not be the last time you run away, and it will not be the last time you reason with yourself like this. 

**Author's Note:**

> Is the second-person POV utter garbage or no?


End file.
